End of the World Poll

I started a poll to find out which apocalypse readers would prefer; please choose from the broad categories listed, or, if none of them tickle your fancy, add suggestions below.

I’ve grown just a little tired of zombies now that they have started showing up in mattress store advertisements, but I might also be suffering from “If other people like it I no longer should” syndrome… deep down, I suspect I will always love the shuffling hordes of undead… so I think ‘zombie apocalypse’ would be my favorite. But maybe I just want to shoot people but not have to feel bad about it (“Hey, I didn’t kill them… they were already dead!”).

Alien invasions / triffids / Terminators, etc., have a lot of appeal, especially if accompanied by desperate fighting on the part of a rag tag band of plucky survivors. And, fuck it, I realized I left ‘robots from the future’ off the poll, but now that someone has voted (me), Blogger tells me that I cannot edit the poll. Dammit! Perhaps ‘robots from the future’ could be assumed under triffids/sleestaks, etc., or ‘space invaders.’ I probably should have included ‘computer goes beserk/Y2k/Skynet’ and ‘robots from the future’ could be included in that…

Rapture / sun going nova, etc., don’t appeal to me because, well, no one gets out of it alive and the whole thing is just over. I saw some film about a nuclear bomb going off when I was a kid and at the end of the movie everyone is just lying around dying with their hair and teeth falling out — not how I envisioned the end of days. That movie still gives me the creeps; I wish I could figure out what it was so I could watch it again.

Tough choices there! In the end I went with “Mayan calendar” because it leaves open so many possibilities: the return of magic? new dimensions opening up? descent into a new dark age? Plus it's what I used for my Rifts redux, so I'm partial to it. Runners up were “Nuclear holocaust” (hard to argue with a classic), “ennui” and “environmental collapse” (the most realistic choices), and “Soylent Green” (or Tastee Ghoul, if you prefer).

You're right – zombie apocalypse is well past oversaturation. Us old time zombie enthusiasts can sit around and grumble about how it used to be cool before everyone and their grandma jumped on the corpse-wagon.

I had to go with the classic nuclear annihilation. However, my mind keeps drifting back to the book No Blade of Grass. Highly recommended – good philosophical look at what lengths you'd go to in orer to survive, from an early 1960's Brit perspective.

Its hard for me to pick just one, as I like to mix things up a lot – Gamma World meets Thundarr style! Like a eugenic-animal and super AI take-over, followed by mutagenic plagues and nukes that turns the earth into an alien world, and the appearance of strange cosmic forces erodes reality, thus allowing for a form of science that plays out like sorcery and dark religion.

So yeah, my vote is more “Fantasy Kitchen Sink”, as I dont care as much about how the world ends, but with all the weird ways the world is changed by it.

My favorite end times scenario is that fossil fuels run out before we harness some better energy source. We still have solar and wind but that becomes very local. Big cities collapse because you can't farm enough to support that population, and enormous numbers of people in the first world just starve. Civilization returns to a smaller scale after the collapse. It's like bacteria in a petri dish: you add a huge flood of nutrients (cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels) and the colony burgeons with growth, only to stagnate and die in its own refuse when the food supply cuts out. Humanity doesn't die out, it just becomes meaningless because we will never go anywhere else since we don't have the technology to get off this rock. Aliens exist -somewhere- but just as we can't see them among the zillions of stars, they can't see us.